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Before the often controversial interview podcast and the many Twitter outbursts, before the precocious splash of “Less Than Zero” and the scandal of “American Psycho,” Bret Ellis—the writerly “Easton” still silent—was a student at the expensive Buckley School in Los Angeles. As a teen-ager, Ellis did drugs, saw R-rated movies, engaged in clandestine sexual affairs, and generally misbehaved, taking full advantage of the autonomy that well-off children were apparently granted in the early nineteen-eighties. That freedom is the backdrop of Ellis’s elegant autofictional 2023 novel “The Shards,” a thrilling reimagining of his adolescence that has now been transformed into a TV show by Ryan Murphy.

The novel’s drama springs from the arrival of a mysterious new student named Robert Mallory during senior year of high school. A fictionalized Bret Ellis and his friends are the popular kids, atop a social hierarchy that should, at this point, be set in stone; Robert’s addition to the mix makes Bret nervous. At the same time, Bret, who is gay and desperate to keep it secret, is immediately drawn to Robert. “The boy aroused something primal in me,” he recalls of their first encounter, at a screening of “The Shining.” Robert soon becomes an object of fantasy and fixation. Working off a few vague details, Bret begins to imagine a link between Robert and a serial killer known as the Trawler, who has been abducting and torturing young women around Los Angeles. When one of the Buckley seniors (a boy whom Bret has secretly been having sex with) goes missing, and is eventually found beaten and mutilated, Bret suspects that Robert is the killer.

Is he? In the novel, Robert is a shifty, slippery presence. Since we see him only through Bret’s eyes, it’s often unclear what about him is real and what is a projection of Bret’s protean desire. At “The Shining,” Bret lustily describes Robert’s head of blond hair. Later, his hair is brown. Sometimes we get a glimpse of Robert as a normal, affable teen before Bret’s narration once again assures us he’s a dangerous psychopath.

Bret has a girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer, but he also has sexual relationships with at least two of his male classmates. His feelings for these boys are described with a soul-baring softness, especially striking for its divergence from Ellis’s usual ruthless unsentimentality. On the other hand, Bret’s feelings for Robert lead him to take increasingly extreme measures, including stalking and, eventually, catastrophic violence. The intensity of his sexuality warps his mind, while the mandate of secrecy feeds his paranoia. The result, to borrow a phrase from Patrick Bateman, the serial killer in “American Psycho,” is that Bret feels “lethal, on the verge of frenzy.”

Equally lethal are Bret’s writerly aspirations. His ability to spin stories about the Trawler means that he is destabilized by the crimes in a way that his classmates aren’t. The achievement of the book is that Ellis (the real one) encases us in Bret (the character)’s obsessively narrativizing consciousness, so that his feverish pursuit of the “truth” rubs off on us. We, too, become fixated on whether small details might reveal Robert to be a murderer. Like Bret, we are eager to uncover the dark secrets of Robert’s past, but as the book goes on we are also creepingly aware that Bret might be more interested in a good story than he is in reality.

Murphy’s adaptation is a somewhat different product. Preserved from Ellis’s novel, and generally well-rendered, are the basic conceits and settings: a rich, secretly gay high-school senior named Bret Ellis is part of a friend group that integrates (or resists integrating) the newcomer Robert Mallory, all the while circled by news of the Trawler. Bret is played by Igby Rigney, whose distant, sneery monotone recalls the voice of the real-life Ellis. The rest of the cast, which includes Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere (the children of the eighties supermodel Cindy Crawford and the actor Richard Gere, respectively), is serviceable and occasionally great, but Rigney is the standout, and his presence or absence, from scene to scene, is starkly felt. The series is gorgeously shot, full of perfectly appointed eighties interiors, and has a soundtrack—Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Rick James, and the Beach Boys—that evidently cost a fortune.

Ryan Murphy claims that he’s always “worshipped” Ellis’s work, and, indeed, one can imagine why the creator of “Glee,” a show about the agonies and the ecstasies of high-school drama, might find the adolescent milieu of “The Shards” compelling. But where “Glee” is a sentimental artifice, a snow-globe world in which teen-age angst and melodrama are of planetary importance, Ellis’s vision of teen-agers, as painted in “Less Than Zero,” his icy début, is numb, droll, sadistic, and alienated. In 2011, Ellis tweeted, “I like the idea of ‘Glee’ but why is it that every time I watch an episode I feel like I’ve stepped into a puddle of HIV?” In his own manner, Ellis may have summed up the disparity between his and Murphy’s sensibilities perfectly. As a novel, “The Shards” is an ambitious metafictional thriller-slash-gay-awakening story, and although, unlike “Less Than Zero,” it’s plot-forward and emotionally intense, Murphy’s attempt to adapt it has, to some degree, amounted to a “Glee”-ification.

Maximalist drama is Murphy’s signature style, and, to that end, he makes several stagy alterations to the novel’s subplots. One of Bret’s primary love interests, Ryan Vaughn, with whom he shares a tender weekend in the novel, is condemned, in the show, to a silly B plot involving (straight) porn and implausible blackmail. There’s a televised dance-off host’s short-lived and pointless baby-mama drama, and the addition of a bizarre kidnapping farce that, despite Ivy Wolk’s expressive and funny performance as its victim, morphs into a lame homecoming-queen makeover story before just being dropped. Perhaps most radical is the show’s portrayal of Bret’s relationship with Terry Schaffer, the father of Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie. In both the novel and the show, Terry is a famous movie producer who, though only nominally closeted, is still married to Debbie’s mother. At first, he comes across as a kind of quasi-predator—flirty and a little gross, but basically harmless. Then Terry takes an interest in Bret. From his daughter, he’s heard about Bret’s novel in progress, also called “Less Than Zero.” He wants to buy Bret lunch, to pick his brain, to encourage him to develop the novel into a screenplay. Then, Terry wants quid-pro-quo sex. In the show, Terry, played by Wes Bentley, is a cartoon creep, wearing a villainous grin as he instigates his sexual encounter with Bret. (We don’t see it; instead, much of the explicit passage from the novel is read verbatim by Rigney, in his flat voice-over.) The big departure comes in the show’s depiction of the aftermath: “I didn’t understand adult things, I just thought I did,” Bret reflects. “I’ve learned through time that many young people make the same mistake.”

This very appropriate, reasonable analysis is quite different from Ellis’s take on the scene in the novel. The business with Terry, Bret says there, “hadn’t bothered me in any substantial way.” In the book’s arc, this lands as a chilling dismissal, and a reminder of the magnitude of Bret’s increasingly psychotic concern over Robert Mallory and the Trawler, and his detachment from his own life. By contrast, Murphy fashions the moment into a statement on trauma, with Bret’s reflections about his youthful naïveté mirroring some of the language of the #MeToo movement. Regardless of the inherent morality of the situation (or if you even believe book-Bret is as unbothered as he claims), the turn is predictable and deflating.

“I didn’t care that Ronald Reagan had been elected president last November,” Bret muses in the novel. “This meant absolutely nothing to me at seventeen and politics have stayed that way for the rest of my life.” This little addendum—that politics mean nothing to the Bret Easton Ellis of 2023—is eminently untrue, as anyone who has listened to his podcast, which often turns to political commentary, will attest. There, Ellis seems, in fact, to have an irresistible negative attraction to politics. Perhaps he does find the whole thing uninteresting—and, on some level, even disgusting—but he can’t stay away. He worries about what he sees as the meddling of left-wing politics in the arts and entertainment (“Ideology trumps aesthetics,” he frequently complains), and the intensity of his claims of neutrality and aloofness belies what are obviously deep, genuine feelings about the political moment. In an interview with the writer Luke Goebel, the subject of the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election came up. Ellis exclaimed, “The right is fucked, the left is fucked,” and went on, “If you live in L.A. and you’re voting for Karen Bass, or anybody else, you’re a nut case!” It’s clear from the rest of the conversation, and from numerous other statements he’s made—and from his 2019 essay collection, “White”—that “or anybody else” was a concession to his left-leaning guest: Ellis preferred the Republican candidate Spencer Pratt, who ultimately lost in the primary.

But “The Shards” is, indeed, something of a political void. There is vanishingly little connecting the novel to the real-life happenings of the eighties. (The most promising candidate for political analysis in the book comes in the form of the Terry Schaffer drama, which might be cast as a denouncement of “victim narratives,” something that Ellis has said that he hates.) This presents a bit of a problem for Murphy, for whom the prepackaged spectacle of political incident has become almost a prerequisite for entertaining television. His dramatizations “The People v. O. J. Simpson” and “Impeachment” (on the Monica Lewinsky scandal) are, arguably, his best works. In both cases, Murphy resists direct commentary, instead using politics as a set piece to make meaning and Shakespearean entertainment out of the players themselves. “The People” leverages the racial tensions surrounding the O.J. case as a dramatic engine, rather than a moral focus. At the heart of “Impeachment” are Lewinsky’s fateful friendship with Linda Tripp, and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage.

With “The Shards,” Murphy doesn’t have as globally significant a set of events to work with. He uses the Trawler and the serial-killer narrative instead. Like the racial fracas of “The People” or the actual impeachment of “Impeachment,” the threat of the Trawler moves the story along, creating gravity and urgency. This is effective enough—we take the Trawler seriously, as a threat—but it also causes a tonal unevenness, and, ultimately, the show is caught in a kind of no man’s land, too schlocky to be menacing and too concerned with the grimness of its events to be a pure excess trip. Unlike in “The People” or “Impeachment,” the character material in “The Shards” doesn’t match the show’s alleged stakes. It’s too campy, too silly, too “Glee.” Ellis’s style isn’t universally beloved, but a character in one of his books probably wouldn’t employ the phrase “spooky season” to refer to October, or—ham-fisting the famous Joan Didion line—proclaim “I was . . . telling myself a story in order to live.”

Murphy obviously wasn’t interested in making a direct adaptation of Ellis’s novel, and most of the time it’s unclear what, exactly, he did want to do with the material. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a show about a teen-ager’s gay awakening, or the fraught management of such a secret; nor is it about the destructive and violent feelings that can accompany creative ambition. (In some ways, “Euphoria” is a better adaptation of “The Shards,” with its competing moral narratives and depictions of the often annihilating power of adolescent sexuality.) At times, Murphy’s show gestures at these themes, but not with any real conviction, and by the end of the series nothing much has been said.

A subject that Ellis likes to discuss on his podcast is how the New Hollywood era of the seventies came to an end with the flop of “Heaven’s Gate,” in early 1981, the same year that “The Shards” takes place. Ellis has an endearing, boyish fondness for the films of the New Hollywood (“Carrie,” “The Deer Hunter,” and “Days of Heaven” are regularly cited), their moral ambiguity and their often gloomy endings. In some sense, “The Shards” is a processing of Ellis’s transition into adulthood, as the cinematic landscape of his childhood died. “It was as if another world was announcing itself, painting the one we had all safely taken for granted into a darker color,” he writes. These lines refer to Robert Mallory’s arrival and the ensuing madness, but they could just as easily refer to the collapse of the Hollywood of Ellis’s youth. In the eighties, cinema would gravitate toward clear messages and sleek blockbusters, many of them action movies. Ellis is at odds with the linear, conformist optimism that defined that era—in 1991, with “American Psycho,” he created a whole serial killer out of his alienation—and in “The Shards” we again find him rejecting those clean, straightforward narratives, constantly hole-poking his own stories and revelling in the unresolved. I can’t help imagining a New Hollywood treatment of “The Shards”—one that incorporates the book’s strange inscrutability, its simultaneous resistance to and obsession with truth, its airy, suspenseful slowness. One that acknowledges the conundrum at the core of the book, and a prevailing force in Ellis’s work: We want to know what really happened. We’ll never know what really happened. ♦

In late July, when Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, endorsed Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, it was unclear what the move meant. Was Whitmer’s intervention an indication of the Democratic establishment’s confidence that Stevens, a centrist congresswoman who’d struggled to gain traction for much of the campaign, was now, just eleven days before the vote, on a path to victory, and just needed a final push to get over the finish line? Or was it a sign that the establishment was panicked that Stevens’s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, a liberal former public-health official, was in the lead—and that the only way to prevent him from winning was a desperate, last-minute endorsement from the most popular Democrat in the state, who’d previously pledged to remain neutral? After last night, it’s clear that the latter was the case—and that the Hail Mary failed.

El-Sayed’s win over Stevens in Michigan, while not the blowout the final polls suggested it would be, is nonetheless the insurgent left’s most important victory of 2026—a year that has already featured many successful challenges to the Party’s establishment. So it’s fitting that El-Sayed is also the most politically talented of the group. He has the charisma of Graham Platner, the populist oysterman who won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary before withdrawing from the race after being accused of sexual assault, which he denied, but none of Platner’s skeletons: El-Sayed, a devout Muslim, does not drink, and he and his wife married when they were both in college. As a Rhodes Scholar with an M.D. and a Ph.D., El-Sayed is even more academically credentialled than Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia grad and a doctoral student who unseated a five-term congressman in New York—plus, unlike Avila Chevalier, he’s a gifted orator who can think on his feet and doesn’t wilt under tough questioning. And, though some of El-Sayed’s detractors dismissed his campaign as an internet phenomenon—“I think there’s an extent to which Abdul is certainly winning in the online contest, but Haley is strongly winning with actual voters,” the Michigan congresswoman Hillary Scholten, who endorsed Stevens, said last week—El-Sayed ran an impressive real-life grassroots operation, with nearly five hundred campaign events in more than a hundred different towns and cities, that helped him overcome Stevens’s nine-to-one TV-spending advantage.

As much as El-Sayed’s win is a testament to his talents, it’s also an indictment of the Democratic establishment. Stevens was elected to Congress in 2018, but her Senate campaign was centered on the work she did in 2009, as a twenty-five-year-old factotum on the Obama Administration team that orchestrated the rescue of the U.S. auto industry. Television ads backing Stevens featured Obama almost as much as they did the candidate herself, even though Obama did not endorse Stevens’s bid. When Stevens visited the Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, a Black Pentecostal church on Detroit’s west side, on a Sunday in May, the church’s pastor introduced her as “the former chief of staff, I think, for President Barack Obama.” Stevens did not correct him. “I will be honored to continue to do the work that I did alongside the great President Barack Obama,” she told the congregation.

Stevens, who benefitted from about sixty million dollars in spending from outside groups, more than half of which reportedly came from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, had much less to say, at the church and in her campaign, about her four terms in Congress. Although she, like pretty much every Democrat these days, described herself as a “fighter” against President Donald Trump, it remained unclear to Michigan Democrats what, exactly, her fighting had got them. El-Sayed, by contrast, spoke openly about his fight against the Democratic establishment and about how he hoped his victory in the state he called “the carotid artery of American politics” would propel a progressive candidate to capture the Party’s Presidential nomination in 2028.

The challenge now for El-Sayed is how to take that fight to the Republicans. Until last night, all of the progressive victories this year came in deep-blue congressional districts or cities, where the Democratic primary is the whole ballgame. But Michigan is a purple state—Trump won there in 2016 and 2024—and El-Sayed will have more than token Republican opposition in the general election in November. Mike Rogers, the G.O.P. nominee, is a former seven-term congressman who, two years ago, came within twenty thousand votes of winning the U.S. Senate race in Michigan. Indeed, the biggest reason that so many establishment Democrats, in both Michigan and Washington, have been so worried about El-Sayed winning the primary is that they believe a candidate as liberal as El-Sayed—who supports Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE, and who calls Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide—cannot win a general election. The bitter nature of the primary contest in its final weeks—with El-Sayed attacking Stevens as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account” who’s unable “to string together two coherent sentences,” and Stevens accusing El-Sayed of wanting to “blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans”—has only intensified that concern. AIPAC will likely spend heavily on Rogers’s behalf, perhaps even more than it spent on Stevens’s. In the Democratic primary, AIPAC’s support for Stevens turned out to be a boon for El-Sayed—such is the lobbying group’s toxicity among Democratic voters these days—but he’s unlikely to enjoy a similar dynamic in the general election this November.

But El-Sayed is operating with a different theory of electability. He believes that, for every older Michigander whose vote he loses because of his decision to campaign with the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who has said he didn’t “have an issue” with Hezbollah and that “America deserved 9/11,” he’ll gain more support from younger Michiganders who didn’t previously vote but turned out because they heard about El-Sayed on Piker’s live stream. He believes that his bro-y campaign style, which struck some voters as sexist when employed against Stevens, will hold greater appeal when he turns it against Rogers, whom he recently dubbed a “beta character.” “You know what I’m gonna do to that man?” he boasted to Semafor’s David Weigel last month. “By the time I’m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I’m gonna define him into eternity.”

Most of all, El-Sayed believes that, in 2026, it’s no longer good politics to be identified with Washington or to play it safe. When I spoke with him in Michigan in late May, he reflected on how the political climate has changed since his first campaign, in 2018, when he unsuccessfully ran for governor. “When Trump won the first time, it felt like the record had skipped, and this time around everyone understands that it’s baked into the infrastructure of American politics,” he said. “I think we’re learning that the Michigan electorate is actually sick and tired of having two options that look virtually the same. I think they want an option that is going to take on the inherited wisdom of the establishments—both of them.” On Tuesday night, Michigan’s Democrats backed El-Sayed in his gamble that an aggressive, combative, and at times divisive approach to politics will work in a swing state. “If perfectly inoffensive was what wins Michigan,” El-Sayed told me, “Donald Trump would never have won Michigan.” ♦

On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists took over the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing an unknown number of Black townspeople and ousting the multiracial, democratically elected municipal government—an act that is thought to be the only successful coup on American soil. The massacre devastated Wilmington’s flourishing Black middle class and sent a message of impunity to white vigilantes nationwide. Lauren Collins, a staff writer who grew up in Wilmington, writes about that day and its aftermath in her new book, “They Stole a City” (excerpted in The New Yorker), a multigenerational history that follows four families with members who were present at the massacre. I recently asked Collins which books she would recommend, from among those that she drew on to write hers. Her answers are below.

“The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson I read Wilkerson’s game-changing chronicle of the Great Migration—which follows three Black Southerners on their journeys to Chicago, Harlem, and Los Angeles—over and over again while I was working on “They Stole a City.” I had to know how she did it. Then I found an interview with Wilkerson in which she compared her book’s overlapping structure to Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic films. Like him, she wove the individual stories of each protagonist together. I did the same for the Wilmington families—two white families who perpetrated the violence of 1898, two Black families who came through it—whom I write about in my book.

“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith Smith’s history, a brilliant study of the way that the legacy of slavery is expressed through its physical sites, reminded me to pay attention to the places that shaped the Wilmington coup and massacre. I examine, for example, the Bellamy Mansion, a ten-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival and Italianate residence finished in 1861 by the socially ambitious, politically extremist John Dillard Bellamy. From its origins as a “secesh house”—a house for slavery and by slavery, its fourteen Corinthian columns shouting Southern nationalism—to its later incarnations as a mini-mall and a museum, the mansion articulates the ideals and fortunes of the family as clearly as any document. In my book, I write about how, in the nineteen-thirties, an octogenarian Ellen Bellamy—a literal Confederate in an attic, navigating a few upper-floor rooms in a high-backed wicker wheelchair—used it as a sort of Pompeii of the Lost Cause.

“Built from the Fire,” by Victor Luckerson Luckerson’s epic exploration of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—encompassing but not limited to the 1921 massacre in which white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black people and incinerated America’s “Black Wall Street”—is important for many reasons, but I’m particularly grateful for its sweeping perspective. The book examines the long lead-up to the violence, continuing all the way through to the event’s reverberations in the present, as a few living survivors and many descendants battle for the reparations they so clearly are due. I took a similar longitudinal, multigenerational approach in “They Stole a City,” expanding the timeline from 1898 into the past and the future, and focussing on families rather than on individual players. November 10, 1898, I argue, is a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet.

Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find your next great read »

Coming soon:

• Chang-rae Lee’s “A Tender Age,” about a young Korean American boy growing up in Westchester County in the nineteen-seventies, is publishing on August 11th.

• Also out on the 11th is Richard Russo’s “Under the Falls,” which tells the story of a musician returning to his tight-knit hometown after eighteen years away.

Everybody’s talking about:

• With the new Anthony Bourdain biopic, “Tony,” coming on Friday, now is the perfect time to pick up “Kitchen Confidential,” which grew from a story published in The New Yorker in 1999.

• “Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent,” by Eve Babitz, is making the book-club rounds. Her 1979 novel, “Sex and Rage,” appeared in our Briefly Noted section that year.

• Cat Marnell has announced her next book: a novel called “The Bored and the Beautiful.” It will be out in early February. In the meantime, read Naomi Fry’s review of her memoir, “How to Murder Your Life.”

P.S. Check out Namara’s three favorite books of the year so far. 📚

As I approached the end of Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” this year’s buzzy crime novel, I was surprised—slightly disoriented, even—by the presence of an unexpected feeling on the page: hope. The feeling is unexpected because of all that has come before it, including in “Everybody Knows,” Harper’s previous novel, to which “A Violent Masterpiece” is a sequel of sorts (though perfectly readable on its own). The world of these books is a bleak, fallen one: a grotesque, Day-Glo Los Angeles where the rich and powerful do whatever they want, aided by armies of flunkies and stacks of N.D.A.s. Both stories burst at the seams with corrupt cops and politicians, private mercenaries, concierge peddlers of drugs and sex and plastic surgery, lawyers who stop charges from sticking, and “black-bag publicists” who stop dirt from surfacing. One central character is a monster clearly cobbled together from recent-ish headlines of American depravity: part Weinstein, part Epstein. (In “A Violent Masterpiece,” he quickly winds up dead in jail.) The novels’ Boschian background is full of people whom the powerful no longer have any need for, or never cared about in the first place—discarded child actors, assistants who couldn’t hack it, addicts who live in encampments.

Harper has been widely fêted by both critics and his fellow crime writers. (“Everybody Knows” was, according to the detective novelist Michael Connelly, “the book everybody’s been waiting for.”) When “A Violent Masterpiece” came out, in April, the Times Book Review dubbed it “the noir novel for our times.” In the noir tradition, Harper’s writing trains us not to set our hopes too high. Again and again, he shows us how would-be rebels who fight “the Beast” (as a few of them call L.A.’s power structure) get defeated and punished, often violently. His prose radiates an ecstatic pessimism, as if lit up from within by the relief of not having to sugarcoat things with comforting lies. “This wicked truth that moves under everything rises to the surface,” he writes, describing an outbreak of police violence against protesters. “The serpent that circles the world shows itself.”

But, as the new book hurtles toward its climax, it starts to seem as if at least some of Harper’s characters might eke out some kind of victory against the Beast. Is Harper, like so many noir writers before him, raising our hopes for the express purpose of dashing them against the rocks? Or is hope really in reach? If so, what kind?

“Noir,” a term originally coined by French critics to refer to certain American films made in the nineteen-forties, now refers to all manner of stories, onscreen and off, with a wide variety of preoccupations and stylistic tendencies. If there’s a single unifying fixation, it might be the contrast between surface and reality, and especially between superficially happy cover stories and subterranean despair. In the forties and fifties, noir stories of criminality thumbed their noses—with style—at the enforced cheeriness of postwar American life, dissenting from the era’s sunny master narrative: that the U.S. was always and forever a beacon of progress, an unambiguous force for good in the world, a place where hard work and upstanding behavior were always rewarded, and crime never paid. In the decades since, more recent variants have adapted this schema for other settings. West Coast noir insists that the sun-drenched beauty and free-spirit mythology of California hide a world of corruption and greed. Nordic noir suggests the presence of violence and hatred beneath the tranquillity and order of the Scandinavian welfare state, just as Southern noir peels back hospitality and charm to reveal repressed family secrets and moral decay.

Noir always means darkness—but how much of it, and how completely, in “true” noir, it blots out the sun has always been a debate among connoisseurs. In essays accompanying their co-edited anthology, “The Best American Noir of the Century,” published in 2010, the genre masters James Ellroy and Otto Penzler insist that literary noir has to mean total bleakness: stories exclusively about desperate people doomed to lose it all, because them’s the breaks. The genre, Ellroy writes, is “the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad. Noir is opportunity as fatality, social justice as sanctified shuck, and sexual love as a one-way ticket to hell.”

Harper is a well-known fan of Ellroy’s; he spent years working up a TV adaptation (never picked up by CBS) of Ellroy’s 1997 novel, “L.A. Confidential,” and, in the afterword for “A Violent Masterpiece,” he thanks Ellroy “for carving the path.” So, as expected, he has gloom to spare. His books are pervaded by depravity of all sorts: casting agencies that funnel desperate young actors to powerful older men; little Weinsteins everywhere; rich kids who get off on launching explosives in homeless camps. There’s even a human-tissue business that scouts the morgue, looking for corpses to process into the stuff of butt lifts and plumped lips. If you’re thinking that a human-tissue business sounds like a great way to hide evidence, you’ve probably been reading too much noir; you’re also right.

“A Violent Masterpiece” alternates between the perspectives of three characters. None of them lose their innocence in the course of the story; they lost it long ago. (Ellroy again: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.”) Kara Delgado works as a fixer at L.A.’s premier concierge service, catering to the outré tastes and perversions of the city’s élite. Doug Gibson, the novel’s closest thing to an idealist, is a pugilistic criminal-defense lawyer, the kind with ads on bus-stop benches. He has a well-worn speech about the value of due process and can speak trenchantly about all the ways the system is stacked against his clients. But somewhere inside he knows that the status quo has made him a wealthy man, while he hasn’t changed the status quo a bit. Jake Deal, formerly employed to dig up secrets for a gossip website, now works for himself as a live streamer; he drives through the city, using a police scanner to track down scenes of chaos and carnage, feeding his viewers’ appetite for vérité gore. If the photos are good enough, he can sell them to his old employer.

All three characters know exactly what’s wrong with the world. If they were in the mood, they could articulate a cogent critique (and, in the next breath, a plausible minimization) of their own contribution. All three are shown enjoying what they do, at least some of the time. Each, in a way, gets to be up close to the gears that make the real world turn. Each gets to enjoy the adrenaline rush of making the world bend to his or her will, at least a little bit: Kara when she gets every rule rendered moot on her clients’ behalf; Gibson when he gets his clients out, or their sentences reduced; Jake when he gets the right footage or finds the right words for his live stream (called the Creepy Crawl) and sees his followers go wild. Here he is, talking to his audience:

“We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky—please rise for our national anthem, am I right?”

He picks up speed. The light turns red. He rockets through it. Pissed-off horns chorus on both sides. He glances down at the chat, watching it roll with HELL YEAHs and mushroom-cloud animations. He turns hard onto Florence—tires sing. This high, wild laugh comes out of him.

In interviews, Harper has described prepping for the novel by driving around L.A. Jake-style, police scanner and all. The live streamer feels like a stand-in for the author’s own ambivalence about crime writing. In one charged scene, Jake—moonlighting as an investigator for a celebrity-blackmail outfit—films through a window as a famous actor becomes increasingly violent with a woman he’s just picked up. At first, Jake is worried mostly about the poor quality of the video he’s capturing. But the worse the scene unfolding through the glass gets, the more troubled Jake becomes—by the celebrity’s actions, yes, but also by his own. Almost by reflex, he punches the window, smashing it. The intensity of Harper’s writing, especially in his grisliest depictions of violence, can feel like the prose equivalent of trying to smash the glass. At other times, the book embodies an awareness that glass-smashing isn’t in the cards.

What is the line, you can sense Harper asking, between documenting the horrors of the world and profiting from them, packaging them—like Jake, like Harper, like almost all crime writers—for an audience safe at home? In one of the novel’s eeriest moments, Jake is driving around the city, talking into his microphone, as usual—only now it’s intentionally unplugged and he isn’t live streaming, because what he’s up to (fighting the Beast) is secret. He’s trying, I think, to figure out what he sounds like when just describing the world isn’t enough, and when he’s not putting his description up for sale. It’s as if Harper, too, is trying to figure out what kind of noir he’s really writing, and why.

Around the novel’s halfway point, one of Harper’s characters dares to change, or try changing, his relationship to the Beast. They receive a brutal noir comeuppance, in a scene of terrifying violence. Reading it, I felt that trademark quicksand feeling of the most hard-core noirs: that every action, no matter its intentions, is sending its characters in only one direction—down, closer to the heart of darkness.

But then the book keeps going. If your preferred experience of reading crime fiction relies on knowing absolutely nothing about how things pan out, stop here. Harper’s characters live to fight another day. (Well, some of them do.) More than that, though, they transform into people who are resolved to fight, with new weapons in their arsenals and new feelings in their hearts. “I’m thinking, maybe there’s another way of being,” one of them says fumblingly, in a rare moment of direct sincerity. “I’d like to find out if there is.”

Is this still noir? Partisans of the Ellroy and Penzler definition probably wouldn’t say so, except perhaps as a diss, proof of a contemporary inability to face misery without slapping on some good cheer at the end. Or perhaps one might say: It’s not really noir—and that’s fine! Ellroy himself, in the nineteen-nineties, declared, “Noir is dead for me,” because its world view was too simple, and left no room for him to explore subjects such as love, redemption, and self-knowledge without forcing them into a predetermined script.

But there’s another way of looking at the noir-ness of Harper’s writing, one that draws on the genre’s history without using it as the basis for an essentialist definition. If traditional noir drew much of its energy from sneering with style at America’s sunny master narratives, those narratives have largely broken down, as has the homogenous mass-media ecosystem that endlessly recirculated them. There’s no significant cultural prohibition against pointing out that things aren’t going so well. (“Things Aren’t Going So Well” is easy to imagine as the title of a Times op-ed, a viral Substack post, or a new A24 movie.) In the era of Trump, Epstein, and all the tentacular corruption they represent, pointing out that there’s rot beneath the surface, or a repressed truth behind the smile, isn’t edgy; it’s rote. Now the rot is right there on the surface; the people smiling are less likely to be clueless optimists than the people who are happy about the rot, or profiting from it. A network of particularly depraved men in “A Violent Masterpiece” has a name for itself, one that speaks not just to its members’ impunity but also to their delight: the Kids in the Candy Store.

Maybe it makes sense that a noir for our current era would dare to find its way to hope, albeit hope of a very noirish variety. If Harper’s voracious hunger for piling on details of Hollywood depravity can seem exploitative, the noir framework suggests another way of looking at it. In order to point—against the prevailing mood of our times—toward a sliver of optimism, he needs his readers to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he’s fully aware just how hard that optimism is to find. The risk, of course, is that he makes the depravity so convincing that hope can only pale in comparison. Readers will have to decide for themselves what to believe. Doing so will mean asking just what they think about the world today and our prospects within it. These are questions that can be discomfiting, even disturbing. Which is, in its way, pretty noir. ♦

The recent release of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has turned just about every film critic in America into a classicist, and vice versa. I’m guilty, too, though I plead extenuating circumstances—namely, the unavoidable fact that, despite the scale of the movie’s IMAX images, its aesthetic import is Lilliputian. Take away its Odysseity and it becomes just a fantasy-spiced action film about a battle-weary protagonist gearing up for one final test. Then again, it’s hard to imagine that a filmmaker adapting a literary classic isn’t calling attention to the choices made in the adaptation. In criticism, everything counts, including the obvious, and Nolan’s film positively invites the comparison, dressing itself—in spite of its deference to current mass-market sensibilities—in the dignity of a classic.

As it happens, the questions raised by both the liberties and the fidelity of Nolan’s adaptation have a strong connection to the root of cinematic modernity. A 1954 essay by François Truffaut put so-called auteurist critics, then a minuscule and outlandish fringe, onto the cultural map. Titled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” and published in the then obscure magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, it’s a wide-ranging screed with a scattershot set of targets, but its opening salvo takes aim at adaptation. At the time, the French film industry was winning international acclaim for films made in what was called the Tradition of Quality, which largely involved adaptations of well-regarded literature: “La Symphonie Pastorale” (1946), based on André Gide’s novel; “Le Rouge et le Noir” (1954), adapted from Stendhal; and a host of others. Truffaut contends that the leading screenwriters of such films—the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost—relied on “the so-called process of equivalence. This process takes for granted that in the novel being adapted there are filmable and unfilmable scenes, and that instead of scrapping the latter (as used to be done) you had to think up equivalent scenes.” For Truffaut, this premise was manifestly limiting and unambitious: “I am by no means convinced that a novel can contain unfilmable scenes, and even less so that scenes decreed to be unfilmable are unfilmable by any director.”

Truffaut rejected the idea that there were built-in limits to the power of cinema, which he understood as an art form equal to any, and thus he also denied that the aesthetic merit of movies depended on the prestige of their sources. Those assumptions were as old as cinema, whose history can be seen mostly as one of adaptation. As soon as movies could tell stories, their makers started raiding literary classics for material. The works of Charles Dickens were quickly adapted by the dozens, starting with an 1897 excerpt from “Oliver Twist.” There was a 1908 version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”; D. W. Griffith’s 1909 adaptation of Robert Browning’s verse drama “Pippa Passes” was the first movie ever reviewed in the New York Times. Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” was adapted in 1918, “The Age of Innocence” in 1924. In the twenties, the German director F. W. Murnau made an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” called “Nosferatu,” and he also filmed Goethe’s “Faust” and Molière’s “Tartuffe”; Jean Renoir adapted Émile Zola’s “Nana” (1926); and, in 1926, there was a version, now lost, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” The early sound era featured Renoir’s 1934 “Madame Bovary,” William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt’s 1935 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” George Cukor’s 1936 “Romeo and Juliet,” Josef von Sternberg’s nineteen-thirties “An American Tragedy” and “Crime and Punishment,” and Frank Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms.” It wasn’t only classics that fed the adaptation machine, which was actually far busier with less acclaimed sources: pick a classic movie at random and it may well be adapted from popular or pulp fiction or general nonfiction: “The Philadelphia Story,” from a Philip Barry play; “42nd Street,” from a novel by Bradford Ropes; “Red River,” from a story by Borden Chase that ran in the Saturday Evening Post; “A Letter to Three Wives,” from the John Klempner novel “A Letter to Five Wives,” which was published in Cosmopolitan; “Bigger Than Life,” from a 1955 medical report by Berton Roueché in The New Yorker.

The temptation to make comparisons is strong. When I scored a secondhand copy of Ropes’s “42nd Street” (published in 1932, the year before the film version was released), I found it to be far more complex and scathing in its vision of the lives of New York theatre people than anything Hollywood, even pre-Hays Code, would have put onscreen. Executives and filmmakers alike were unhesitatingly extractive with these commercial sources. Censorship—not just from studios but from government officials, who unhesitatingly banned movies or demanded cuts—was responsible for many softened details. There are major subplots in Ropes’s novel involving gay relationships, and abortion, which was illegal across the country, is treated as commonplace.

An important caveat when discussing the merits of adaptations is that a viewer or a critic may be unacquainted with the works being adapted—or even unaware that a film is an adaptation at all. Many of the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s films have literary sources that are relatively unfamiliar to non-Japanese readers: his film “The Life of Oharu” is based on Saikaku Ihara’s 1686 work “The Life of an Amorous Woman,” and “The Crucified Lovers” is adapted from a 1715 play by Monzaemon Chikamatsu. I can’t say whether appreciation of these movies is heightened or diminished by comparisons—only that the films feature some of the most exalted dramas, images, and performances that the cinema has offered.

That said, it’s certainly fun, and maybe even illuminating, to offer a one-handed, five-fingered taxonomy of literary adaptations:

1. Close: Orson Welles’s “Chimes at Midnight,” which brings Falstaff to the fore from a handful of Shakespeare’s plays.

2. Distant: Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” which retains the framework of the story but updates the events, changing the dialogue, the setting, some key characters, and their activities.

3. Keeping the body, changing the engine: Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” a Bronze Age version that follows the events in the text but with dialogue completely rewritten, scenes and characters added, and psychology and morality altered.

4. Changing the body, keeping the engine: Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet,” starring Ethan Hawke, which places Shakespeare’s dialogue and characters in modern settings and costumes.

5. Unrecognizable, as the two stories by Guy de Maupassant adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for “Masculine Feminine” were eventually deemed by their publisher to be.

But, if the art of filmmaking is inseparable from that of adaptation, it’s because almost all feature films are made by way of a fundamental form of adaptation: that of a script. Whether it’s written by the director or by another screenwriter, whether a film is made under studio supervision or independently, most dramatic features start on the page, and every subsequent step in production is an effort to translate that text into images and sounds. This method is inherent to commercial filmmaking, in which a script functions both as a contract (getting all the participants on the same page, so to speak) and as a shopping list for locations, costumes, décor, and the like.

The fundamental question of scripts and their adaptations is one of freedom. Filmmakers who survived in the studio system often figured out how to effect changes beyond what their studio minders would grant. There’s a delightful secret history of Hollywood directors whose ruses and stratagems bought them an unusual amount of leeway with their scripts. Howard Hawks, adapting a novel by Edna Ferber for the drama “Come and Get It,” took advantage of his producer Samuel Goldwyn’s sick leave during the shoot and changed the story drastically. Allan Dwan walked off the set of “Trail of the Vigilantes” and, expecting to be fired, demanded to turn the Western drama into a comedy—and then kept his revisions a secret to ward off interference. In film after film, Robert Siodmak leveraged small script tweaks into major revisions. Nicholas Ray closed the set of “In a Lonely Place” and collaborated with three actors—Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Art Smith—on an on-the-spot rewrite of the film’s ending. To be sure, there’s a less delightful history, too, of latitude punished: R.K.O. downright massacred Orson Welles’s Booth Tarkington adaptation, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” both slashing the film that he’d made and encumbering it with rewritten scenes shot by someone else. And, far into the filming of “Come and Get It,” Goldwyn returned to work and, incensed by Hawks’s transformations of the source material, replaced him with another director.

I’m even more enamored of the way that one of the less appreciated Hollywood greats, Gregory La Cava, approached screenwriting. On X, the researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith has been posting a remarkable trove of archival documents about La Cava, and they reveal that, though he worked in the studio system from the twenties through the forties, he generally operated without a script. Katharine Hepburn, speaking of the comedy-drama “Stage Door,” in which she starred, said as much: “We started shooting with no script.” On the set, she said, “he disappeared. About an hour later he came back with the speech” that she was to deliver in a climactic scene. That’s the same method that’s portrayed in Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” which depicts the shoot of “Breathless.” Still, even these freewheeling movies had scripts, albeit ones written on the fly and handed to actors at the last minute, and there was enough on paper in advance that everyone showed up at the same place at the same time and had a sense of the story that was being told.

For filmmakers, the approach to a script (regardless of who wrote it or when) is akin to the approach to any literary classic: the situations and the characters are givens, and all that matters is one’s own interpretations, extrapolations, intuitions, and visions of them. With Homer’s Odyssey, for example, the readily available text easily allows critics to perceive what Nolan does, or doesn’t, do with the material at hand. Yet just about any movie’s characters and stories offer a vast array of implications and vistas that are equally available to critics, if they just use their own imaginations. No less than for filmmakers, critics’ own approach to the texts of movies—whether literary, popular, scripted, or improvised—is a matter of freedom, not from authorities but from cautious inhibitions and crowd-pleasing conventions, from the facility of literalism and the faux dignity of academicism. ♦